Click On Democracy

The Internet's Power To Change Political Apathy Into Civic Action

Grant Reeher, Steve Davis, Larry Elin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813341835
• eBook ISBN: 9780429981173
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Click on Democracy examines the first national election in which the Internet played a major role. The contributors argue that the Internet's most profound political impact on Election 2000 has largely been missed or underestimated. The reason: the difference it made was more social than electoral, more about building political communities than about generating votes and money. The contributors to Click on Democracy talk at length with the people who are using the Internet in new and effective ways, and who are capitalizing on the Internet's power as a networking tool for civic action. Viewed from this bottom-up perspective, the Internet emerges as an exciting and powerful source of renewal for civic engagement. The new foreword is from Scott Heiferman and William Finkel, both of Meetup, Inc.

1
Don't do it, Drew

IT WAS THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, WHEN DREW MCGARR, REAL estate agent, dropped the bomb on a tight circle of friends, political junkies all.

"If Al Gore wins, my wife and I have both pledged never to vote again. If Al Gore wins, we hang it up."

He said he meant it.

His friends were stunned. Indeed, they were alarmed to hear such a declaration from a sixty-year-old devotee of democracy who'd never missed a vote since he'd turned twenty-one. This was a man who loved voting, a man of such principle that he'd declared he questioned online balloting because he so believed in the process, in the public act of voting. "Over the years, my wife and I, we've always met and went to vote, and every time there's always that good feeling you have when you walk out of that school cafeteria, that lifted spirit," he'd once mused. He was proud that he'd brought up his three children—now thirty-six, thirty-seven, and thirty-eight—to feel the same way

Yet in late summer 2000, he sounded depressed, punctuating his melancholy declaration by saying, "As I get older I seem to see the glass half empty."

His friends fired back. They tried to pump him up. One in particular, Alan Kardoff, voiced outrage. Alan could go on a bit, he could be hyperbolic, but he was genuinely passionate about politics. "Baloney. You're a fighter," he told Drew. "You believe in America. The day you stop voting is right after you, like the rest of us, go to Eternal Rest. I feel the same way, almost on the other side. I never figured you for a coward."

PHOTO 1.1 Drew McGarr

Kardoff believed he spoke for his friends. "If you bail out, we have to all adjust and readjust. So do you. That is, unless your participation so far has been a charade. I know this is not true. Are you the only one who may feel a bit disenchanted?"

Dave Kaplan chimed in: "Alan is exactly correct on this! We need debate on issues. We need each other. Americans of all ideologies join together to form and maintain our imperfect government and society, but it is still the best of any in the world. Why should one part leave voluntarily, and cause unforeseen adjustments in all parts of the system?

"Hang in there," he urged Drew. "No matter how empty the top half of the glass is, the bottom half of the glass is always half full."

The conversation was percolating now; LuAnn Molloy threw her support to McGarr. "If Al Gore wins," she told the others, "I don't care anymore and renounce any interest in politics and will fit in with everyone else I know, too."

Now it was a debate in full flame. Mona Twocats weighed in. "No. No. A thousand times no. Even though I may disagree with your philosophy, it is imperative that we all continue to at least express our values at the polls. I try to tell people that not voting is only voting by omission. There is no such thing as not being involved in politics. When you refuse to support your value system, you are voting against it."

PHOTO 1.2 Alan Kardoff

PHOTO 1.3 Dave Kaplan

And finally, Kardoff (a Gore man) wrapped it up, emoting in one of his signature stem-winders. He advised the group that, rather than giving up on politics, "I am fed up so much that my commitment to trying to help our nation elect the better candidates will be intensified.

PHOTO 1.4 Mona Twocats

PHOTO 1.5 LuAnn Molloy

"If Governor Bush and the secretary [Cheney] get in, I will write more e-mails during their term, if my CPU holds up and the economy doesn't fall apart. So, those who wish to leave have the right to do so. They have the right not to vote and join the other 53%-plus of eligible voters who are too busy to honor our patriots. There are a few people who will stay and fight, maintain their loyalty through action rather than hibernation and vote, vote, vote, regardless of what happens with the presidential elections. I think there are more than a few who will stay active citizens. When people are serious and get fed up, they don't crawl into caves. They stand up, stubborn, kick, stall, resist and fight for what is right. I am fed up. I am stubborn like a donkey, too."

Who are these Americans? And what neighborhood fence do they talk over? Drew McGarr is a real estate agent in Memphis, Tennessee. Alan Kardoff is a former business-school professor living in Melbourne, Florida. Dave Kaplan is a Des Moines, Washington, city councilman. A gay man, he came out not long ago. LuAnn Molloy is a mother of three teens in Minnesota who holds down two jobs. Mona Twocats, a Native American, is a Green party activist from Bakersfield, California.

How could such a disparate group come together, bond, and share such passion, empathy, and moral conviction?

On the Internet. All of them were part of an online community that they joined and nurtured during the 2000 election.¹ Kaplan says the Internet connected him to the world of gay Republicans and emboldened him to come out. He realized he was not alone through online conversations with others, many of them members of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national political organization of gays and lesbians. Thousands of miles separate these friends, but they might as well have been sitting around the same kitchen table as cranking out their passions on Compaqs and Dells from desktops in dens or on laptops propped on bedroom pillows.

What makes this group's conversation politically meaningful? What is the Internet contributing here to the vitality of America's political life? At the very least, the fact that the conversation is taking place is significant. And as we will soon describe in a much broader fashion, these kinds of conversations have declined in recent years, a fact that should worry us. The Internet is the most efficient way for this diverse and scattered group to communicate at all.

And there is a deeper value. Political exchanges on the Internet are often dismissed as the chat-room babbling of the ill informed or the rude ramblings of people bent on venting. Peter Kollock and Marc Smith, editors of Communities in Cyberspace, describe online chat groups as either anarchistic or a dictatorship, depending on how moderated they are.² But as Drew McGarr and his friends illustrate, substantive discussions and real friendships can build and real passions spill. These people genuinely cared about each other. Over the Internet they built bridges to each other across chasms of politics, religion, economic status, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual orientation. They accomplished this in ways not available to those without the Internet. The Internet helped to create a community or, as Paul Rogat Loeb puts it, "a virtual village."³

Loeb's vision looks back to Marshall McLuhan's hope, expressed in the early 1960s and never realized, that television would create a "global village." We think, however, that evidence emerged during the 2000 election to suggest that the Internet has promise to succeed where television did not. The McGarr story is playing out in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar online communities involving millions of people. During the 2000 election, as the national discourse turned toward politics, so too did many of these cybercommunities. While we wrote this book, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took place. We watched cybercommunities grow even closer, the discourse become more impassioned, and political action even more profound and meaningful.

This book describes the use of the Internet in American political life. It takes the 2000 election as its case study, but its arguments extend well beyond that event. It is based on extensive observation of Internet use, from the largest and most powerful institutions to the most average individuals. It comes to a hopeful conclusion. Our overall argument: The principal political institutions used the Internet as a new version of the older, one-to-many TV, radio, and print media and were in fact able to achieve some notable innovations in political communication. But they nevertheless failed to change political life in the dramatic ways many Internet and political observers had hoped to see. Instead, the greatest and most positive political impact was the way informal groups and individuals used the Internet to create and enhance political communities. In this way, the Internet helped to create an elusive and precious social good, often known in academic circles as "social capital."

The Decline of Social Capital

The community that Drew McGarr, Dave Kaplan, Mona Twocats, LuAnn Molloy, and Alan Kardoff formed in cyberspace exemplifies a degree of connection that has become increasingly rare in physical space. As social scientist Robert Putnam hammers home in his book Bowling Alone, Americans gradually have withdrawn from almost every form of civic engagement over the past forty years. Regardless of the barometer, "the last several decades have witnessed a serious deterioration of community involvement among Americans from all walks of life," he says.⁴ By his calculations, we are 40 percent less likely to be involved in political or civic organizations of all kinds than we were in the mid-1960s. Membership has declined in organizations as wide-ranging as the PTA, labor unions, political parties, mainline Christian denominations, and even bowling leagues. Our own personal social connections have weakened, too. We are now less likely to visit friends, have dinner with our own families, or even have a drink in a bar with our coworkers.

All of these and many other indicators signal a serious loss of what Putnam and others call social capital: the "connections among individuals— social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them," which in turn enhance "the productivity of individuals and groups."⁵ These connections also enhance our general happiness, our health, and the quality of our political life. The connections that generate social capital are fueled by relatively basic, but unfortunately diminishing, qualities: honesty reciprocity, and trust. These qualities produce and are, in turn, reinforced by community.

As Putnam notes in his book, social scientists have long been concerned with social capital. Putnam's work draws theoretically on the works of economist Glenn Loury and sociologist James Coleman, in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, and before these on the writings of political reformer L. J. Hanifan in the early 1900s. Social theorists and public intellectuals known as communitarians, such as Amitai Etzioni, have worried about social capital, though they may not refer to it as such. Sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues found a widespread sense of social disconnectedness in their classic Habits of the Heart but again, did not call it social capital.⁶ Other social observers have noted it, as well. In a scathing indictment of the American political system, the journalist William Greider laments the decline of "connective tissue" in society.⁷ And in a recent book on loyalty, the famed Clinton political strategist James Carville worries about "busted connectors."⁸ As Putnam points out, Yogi Berra may have framed the problem best: "If you don't go to someone's funeral, they won't come to yours."

Although no one knows exactly what is causing the decline, it appears to have affected everyone, at every station in life. During the decades Putnam chronicles, we became a nation of suburbanites who spend about 25 percent more time in our cars than we did thirty years ago. Our roots are not simply shallow; they are hydroponic—veritably suspended in air. There are more two-income families, leaving many homes empty during the day and removing what had been a dependable supply of community volunteers. Our knowledge of and interest in current events, one of the most reliable indicators of civic engagement, is waning. We watch entertainment television more but the news less. Those who do watch the news are seeing less "hard" news—stories that deal with major events and issues affecting the community and country. Replacing it are tabloid forms of "infotainment" and critical journalism as news organizations battle for audience share with entertainment programming.⁹

The ideas of community, communication and democracy, and civics endure when put to the test of thoughtful discussion and scientific method and applied to the newest or to the oldest technology. That was apparent most recently in the work of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, respected media critics who wrote The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. Kovach and Rosenstiel produced their work based on the efforts of a group of twenty-five journalists, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, who did research, conducted surveys, and talked to dozens of citizens and news professionals at great length. The authors' conclusions and observations illuminate not just the media business but the evolving definitions of community and discourse, whether it is online or offline, mediated or unmediated, broadcast or video-streamed nationwide or traded among chatting neighbors. Kovach and Rosenstiel wrote:

The news media help us define our communities, and help us create a common language and common knowledge rooted in reality.... This definition has held so consistent through history, and proven so deeply ingrained in the thinking of those who produce news through the ages, that it is in little doubt. It is difficult, in looking back, even to separate the concept of journalism from the concept of creating community and later democracy. .. . Even people who resist the label of journalist, who work on the Web, offer a similar goal. Omar Wasow, a self-described "garage entrepreneur" who founded a Web site called New York Online, told us at one forum that his aim, in part, was helping to create citizens who are "consumers, devourers and debunkers of media ... an audience who have engaged with the product and can respond carefully."¹⁰

We read newspapers less. This decline is more pronounced among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds (down 57 percent) than those over sixty (down 10 percent). What is true for television news is also true for news-papers—there is a preponderance of soft, human-interest news.¹¹ The news that is consumed is of little value. A generation of highly educated but less informed citizens looms as the entire population ages and the more informed die off.

Lost in the blizzard of disappointing survey results is the psychological toll inflicted on the individuals who collectively make up the statistics. We are a race of social beings who need healthy contact with each other but are spending less time even attempting to stay in touch. As individuals we seem to be inflicting on ourselves the most fearsome penalty we impose on our criminals: solitary confinement.

This combination—disconnection from each other and uninterestedness in community affairs—has taken a measurable toll on every form of civic engagement. Even forms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword to the Paperback Edition
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Authors and Research Contributors
• 1 Don't Do It, Drew
• 2 Election.dud
• 3 Hype
• 4 Humility
• 5 Hope
• 6 Communities of Belief
• 7 Communities of Action
• 8 Communities of Identity
• 9 Communities of Discourse
• 10 The Future
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index